Quotes from Alex Haley

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

Every death is like the burning of a library.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.

The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Racism is taught in our society... it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books.

Is this how you repay my goodness--with badness?" cried the boy. "Of course," said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. "That is the way of the world.

Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars--caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He will never get completely over the memory of the bars.

Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.

Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!

I was weeping for all of history's incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind's greatest flaw...

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only Negro in America who could either start a race riot-or stop one. When I once quoted this to him, tacitly inviting his comment, he told me tartly, "I don't know if I could start one. I don't know if I'd want to stop one.

nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano leaves in which she soaked her feat -and the pale palms of her hands- to an inky blackness. When Kunta asked his mother she told him to run along. So he asked his father, who told him, "The more blackness a woman has the more beautiful she is.

Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee." (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)

Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.

And yet had not a pagan the right to be a pagan?

Playboy: Why are you smiling? Thompson: Am I smiling? Yeah, I guess I am…well, it's fun to lose it sometimes.